hmkpoker
10-27-2006, 03:36 PM
There have been a few posts suggesting that evolution has, for all functional purposes, terminated in the modern world. Resources are now so abundant that reproductive success is greater in the impoverished portions of the world than the civilized portions. Children, once thought necessary as an investment to provide for someone in their old years, are now more of a liability/luxury in the civilized world. Thanks to contraception, people in the civilized world are able to fulfill their reproductive urges without any chance of reproducing.
This seems horrible; those exceptional one of us who are getting good educations and researching cancer cures or writing symphonies are not passing on their genes while uncivilized religious fanatics are reproducing in droves, their offspring easily living long enough to reproduce. If anything, natural selection is now working against us, since reproductive success is no longer the goal of civilization (heck, many of us want the population of our species to decrease.) Surely, for our own benefit, we must intervene and stop natural selection if our civilization is to progress.
This is dead wrong.
Natural selection is just as valuable today as it ever was. It is evolution that is less applicable or less valuable.
Let me explain what I mean.
What is natural selection? It's a very simple principle. You have an event and a medium. The event, verb, is an action or movement that takes place within a material substrate. The medium, noun, is the physical matter in which these events takes place. It could be anything; neural ciruitry, computer chips, a cell nucleus, your front gate, hydrogen atoms in deep spaces; literally anything where matter is interacting with other matter.
Some events are self-replicating, they cause a very similar event to occur upon their execution. A thermite reaction is a perfect example: the event of adding heat to aluminum and iron oxide will cause their molecules to merge and in so doing produce more heat. The self-replicating behavior of heat and thermite reaction rapidly spreads throughout the medium until the medium is no longer conducive to the event. All events change their mediums. When the medium is no longer conducive to the self-replication of the event, the event ceases to occur, and becomes extinct.
No communication is perfect, so any imperfections in replicating the event must result in a change of that event, or mutation. When different replicating events co-exist, their medium-altering existences challenge each other's ability to continue replicating. Those that go on to dominate continue to exist in that particular medium while the others do not. Because "fitness" is described as functionality relative to the medium itself, those that manage to survive are axiomatically more fit than the others.
Natural selection, then, is the tendency for more fit events to thrive in changing circumstances, and less fit ones to die out. It requires no algorithm or central planning to take place; it is merely the inevitable result of matter moving in time. It is happening everywhere, always.
Notice that I did not say anything about DNA, reproduction, or speciation. Evolution refers specifically to natural selection in a specific area. The event is the replication of genetic information, and the medium is the biological spheres in which it takes place. This is a very specific and distinguishable kind of natural selection, but it is neither special in its properties nor is it discontinuous from other natural selection (the origins of the genetic structures needed to transfer evolution's events could not have arisen were it not for the primordial naturally selective processes of carbon groups and atomic fusing in the billions of years before.)
The organisms that result are often confused as the event themselves. This is not the case; the resulting organisms are simply byproducts of the genetic replication. It is easy for us to confuse the two, but the newly emerging species simply reflect a change in the medium caused by competing self-replicating events. We may also be led to think that natural selection is a slow process, as replication occurs only once per generation. But compare this with an unstable fission reaction in uranium, and you will see that events can replicate themselves millions of times per second, and be naturally selected to end just as quickly.
The truly amazing thing about natural selection is that given enough time, dominant events can change the medium so much that a completely new medium is created. Eons of atomic fusion from gravitational compression resulted in a panoply of elements, which created the necessary medium for chemical reactions on a molecular, not atomic, level, and for eons afterward chemical reactions self-replicated to form a planetary surface that would eventually be conducive to the replication of even more complex genetic information.
What has happened after millions of years of genetic replication is that species were naturally selected to observe and imitate the behavior of others based on preference. Desirable behaviors were imitated as they were conducive to survival within a species' mind while undesirable behaviors carry no incentive for the mind to replicate them. Evolution created a medium of mind for the new event of behavior to flourish.
Behaviors follow the same exact laws of natural selection that genetic replications do (although they tend to replicate and mutate much more rapidly). The first man who discovered fire wanted to show the members of his tribe what he had accomplished. They, loving what this wonderful discovery could provide for their well-being, copied the behavior and were driven to show others. Quickly, the understanding of how to create fire became a self-replicating event that survived for centuries until it was later dominated by the self-replicating event of learning how to use modern appliances.
Furthermore, unlike evolution, the fitness of behavioral events is not tied to the survival of its host mediums. Show any 10 year old what happens when you mix mentos and diet coke, and he will be quick to show this discovery to all his friends, and many messes will be made. This adds absolutely no advantage to these childrens' survival or reproductive potential, it is selected solely because it is fun. Because people enjoy fun and wish to exercise it, society is an explosion of songs, jokes, gossip, inventions, stories, games, beliefs, businesses and theories; the dominant of which often conferring no further success to the species' survival. Those that are selected are chosen because they confer percieved utility, be it in the form of happiness or efficiency, to the individuals choosing to help replicate it.
So when you take a look at that cancer-curing doctor with great ideas and the foresight to have had a vasectomy, you need also remember that it is his behavior which is valuable, and which will survive him even if his genes do not. It is completely unnecessary to civilization that his genes are preserved and replicated. The religious whacko with a dozen kids is simply less likely to create dominating behavior, and the religion that he replicates today will soon become extinct as irrational beliefs are less fit to survive in a world of ever-expanding competitive information.
Natural selection is as meaningful today as it ever was. New playing field, same rules.
CLIFF NOTES: Natural selection is a blanket term for the tendency of more fit self-replicating events to dominate inferior ones in an ever-changing medium. Evolution specifically refers to the natural selection of genetic information in the biological sphere. It is a common mistake to think that natural selection is strictly evolutionary, and leads one to ignore the fact that valuable social behaviors are being naturally selected, regardless of the reproductive success of their originators.
This seems horrible; those exceptional one of us who are getting good educations and researching cancer cures or writing symphonies are not passing on their genes while uncivilized religious fanatics are reproducing in droves, their offspring easily living long enough to reproduce. If anything, natural selection is now working against us, since reproductive success is no longer the goal of civilization (heck, many of us want the population of our species to decrease.) Surely, for our own benefit, we must intervene and stop natural selection if our civilization is to progress.
This is dead wrong.
Natural selection is just as valuable today as it ever was. It is evolution that is less applicable or less valuable.
Let me explain what I mean.
What is natural selection? It's a very simple principle. You have an event and a medium. The event, verb, is an action or movement that takes place within a material substrate. The medium, noun, is the physical matter in which these events takes place. It could be anything; neural ciruitry, computer chips, a cell nucleus, your front gate, hydrogen atoms in deep spaces; literally anything where matter is interacting with other matter.
Some events are self-replicating, they cause a very similar event to occur upon their execution. A thermite reaction is a perfect example: the event of adding heat to aluminum and iron oxide will cause their molecules to merge and in so doing produce more heat. The self-replicating behavior of heat and thermite reaction rapidly spreads throughout the medium until the medium is no longer conducive to the event. All events change their mediums. When the medium is no longer conducive to the self-replication of the event, the event ceases to occur, and becomes extinct.
No communication is perfect, so any imperfections in replicating the event must result in a change of that event, or mutation. When different replicating events co-exist, their medium-altering existences challenge each other's ability to continue replicating. Those that go on to dominate continue to exist in that particular medium while the others do not. Because "fitness" is described as functionality relative to the medium itself, those that manage to survive are axiomatically more fit than the others.
Natural selection, then, is the tendency for more fit events to thrive in changing circumstances, and less fit ones to die out. It requires no algorithm or central planning to take place; it is merely the inevitable result of matter moving in time. It is happening everywhere, always.
Notice that I did not say anything about DNA, reproduction, or speciation. Evolution refers specifically to natural selection in a specific area. The event is the replication of genetic information, and the medium is the biological spheres in which it takes place. This is a very specific and distinguishable kind of natural selection, but it is neither special in its properties nor is it discontinuous from other natural selection (the origins of the genetic structures needed to transfer evolution's events could not have arisen were it not for the primordial naturally selective processes of carbon groups and atomic fusing in the billions of years before.)
The organisms that result are often confused as the event themselves. This is not the case; the resulting organisms are simply byproducts of the genetic replication. It is easy for us to confuse the two, but the newly emerging species simply reflect a change in the medium caused by competing self-replicating events. We may also be led to think that natural selection is a slow process, as replication occurs only once per generation. But compare this with an unstable fission reaction in uranium, and you will see that events can replicate themselves millions of times per second, and be naturally selected to end just as quickly.
The truly amazing thing about natural selection is that given enough time, dominant events can change the medium so much that a completely new medium is created. Eons of atomic fusion from gravitational compression resulted in a panoply of elements, which created the necessary medium for chemical reactions on a molecular, not atomic, level, and for eons afterward chemical reactions self-replicated to form a planetary surface that would eventually be conducive to the replication of even more complex genetic information.
What has happened after millions of years of genetic replication is that species were naturally selected to observe and imitate the behavior of others based on preference. Desirable behaviors were imitated as they were conducive to survival within a species' mind while undesirable behaviors carry no incentive for the mind to replicate them. Evolution created a medium of mind for the new event of behavior to flourish.
Behaviors follow the same exact laws of natural selection that genetic replications do (although they tend to replicate and mutate much more rapidly). The first man who discovered fire wanted to show the members of his tribe what he had accomplished. They, loving what this wonderful discovery could provide for their well-being, copied the behavior and were driven to show others. Quickly, the understanding of how to create fire became a self-replicating event that survived for centuries until it was later dominated by the self-replicating event of learning how to use modern appliances.
Furthermore, unlike evolution, the fitness of behavioral events is not tied to the survival of its host mediums. Show any 10 year old what happens when you mix mentos and diet coke, and he will be quick to show this discovery to all his friends, and many messes will be made. This adds absolutely no advantage to these childrens' survival or reproductive potential, it is selected solely because it is fun. Because people enjoy fun and wish to exercise it, society is an explosion of songs, jokes, gossip, inventions, stories, games, beliefs, businesses and theories; the dominant of which often conferring no further success to the species' survival. Those that are selected are chosen because they confer percieved utility, be it in the form of happiness or efficiency, to the individuals choosing to help replicate it.
So when you take a look at that cancer-curing doctor with great ideas and the foresight to have had a vasectomy, you need also remember that it is his behavior which is valuable, and which will survive him even if his genes do not. It is completely unnecessary to civilization that his genes are preserved and replicated. The religious whacko with a dozen kids is simply less likely to create dominating behavior, and the religion that he replicates today will soon become extinct as irrational beliefs are less fit to survive in a world of ever-expanding competitive information.
Natural selection is as meaningful today as it ever was. New playing field, same rules.
CLIFF NOTES: Natural selection is a blanket term for the tendency of more fit self-replicating events to dominate inferior ones in an ever-changing medium. Evolution specifically refers to the natural selection of genetic information in the biological sphere. It is a common mistake to think that natural selection is strictly evolutionary, and leads one to ignore the fact that valuable social behaviors are being naturally selected, regardless of the reproductive success of their originators.